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Hello. Welcome to the Pirate History Podcast. My name is Matt. Thank you for listening.

I've been reading a book about Charlemagne, the Frankish King, the first Holy Roman Emperor. It's a good book, but it's kind of weird because we know so little about the actual man.

You know, we know a good deal about his wars and his laws and his religious practices and his decrees, but there's not a whole lot of just pure biographical data.

So we get a lot of tertiary information in there about the Frankish kingdom as it kind of relates to the king himself.

And one fact in there really jumped out at me. Charlemagne enacted a law that every woman in his kingdom in his empire be required to provide one linen shirt a year to his household.

This was not an insubstantial tax. The raw material that goes into making linen, the flax, well it wasn't expensive per se, but it wasn't free.

More than that though, the processing that flax into fabric and then actually making a shirt out of it, well that was a labor intensive process.

It could take months, you know, considering all of the other work that was heaped on most women in the empire.

And when we say the household, the royal household, we're not talking about the king and his immediate family.

That was a household that included all of Charlemagne's knights and he had kind of a knights of the round table situation with his paladins.

But then there were all of the youths that Charlemagne was responsible for. All of his wards and the ladies in waiting for his wives and all of the hostages were foreign powers.

But then all of the servants were included as well.

Across the empire that means hundreds of cooks and maids and smiths and horsemasters and hawkers and game wardens.

A whole lot of people, but the largest group by far and this is on brand for Charlemagne were the religious folk, the priests and nuns and monks.

Charlemagne had a ton of churches and nunneries and monasteries under his personal supervision.

They were considered part of his household and he provided all of them with linen garments.

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